Where are the best places in the US for our new Syrian refugee friends?

Will Rogers once said, “A stranger is just a friend you haven’t met yet.” That’s how I feel about the 10,000 or more refugees Obama has promised to bring to America. I want them to move to my little town. I want my hometown to have the very best modern traditions from Damascus, Aleppo, and Raqqah brought to my doorstep. If I can’t move to the Middle East, the next best thing is to bring the Middle East here and have it all around me.

But unfortunately, my hometown doesn’t have space for our Sunni and Shia future friends. Most of our multi-family homes and apartments are filled with other visitors who are as high on virtue as they are low on documentation. So I started wondering: what is the best place for all our soon to be great Syrian friends? Here’s what I came up with:

1) Santa Monica, California. Santa Monica would be perfect for many Middle Eastern refugees. There is a wonderful pier and walkway along the beach filled with tons of bikini-clad women who love diversity and would surely welcome more of it. Santa Monica also has the advantage of being near Hollywood. Hollywood always has need of Arab actors to play heroes or helpless victims in movies about the CIA and American businesses manipulating the Middle East to their own end.

2) Greenwich Village, New York City. Sunni and Shia refugees with ultra-religious attitudes would be perfect for Greenwich Village. It’s so culturally rich – with restaurants and gay bars with transvestites, not to mention the annual gay nude Halloween Parade. It’s also probably one of the few places where transgendered Muslim men can find burkas made especially for men. Putting fundamentalist Muslim sympathizers together with gays has an additional benefit – each can help the other out with their prejudices. Gays can help fundamentalist Muslims with their homophobia, and fundamentalist Muslims can help gays with their Islamophobia. Before you know it, they will all be holding hands.

3) Washington, D.C. It would be great for these Middle Eastern Muslims of unknown background to settle in the Capitol Hill area of Washington, D.C. They would be fascinated to go onto Capitol Hill itself and visit with the House of Representatives, as well as the Senate. They would also have easy access to the offices of members of Congress, and they could generate goodwill by dropping by and saying hello. Members of Congress are so numerous that oftentimes you don’t even need to go into the Capitol to see them; they can be encountered walking on the street. I think our new unvetted guests would enjoy the opportunity to strike up impromptu encounters with congressmen, and we all would benefit from the resulting exchanges, don’t you think?

4) Minneapolis, Minnesota. Minneapolis has a small problem with radicalized Somali Muslims. The Syrian Muslims can help by moving in and keeping an eye out for their radicalized brethren.

5) The Aleutian Islands. After spending all their lives in the hot desert, the Syrians might enjoy a cooler island climate. It’s just like Hawaii, only without Hawaiians, and 70 degrees cooler.

6) Alcatraz. If providing housing for all these refugees is a problem, why not go to ready-made housing? Alcatraz has rows and rows of single-family rooms already built. All they require is a lick of paint and some landscaping, and it will look like a top apartment building in Beirut.

What do you think? Where would you like our new unvetted Middle Eastern Muslim friends to settle? Do you have any room in your basement?

This article was written by Ed Straker, senior writer of NewsMachete.com, the conservative news site.